Thinking about the pizza video from my last post leads me to another video that makes me think of Drobo’s new support for SSDs. Neither SSDs nor tiering are new to the industry, they really aren’t, but Drobo provides them in very unique way. Drobo makes them available in the same system as high-capacity hard disk drives. Small companies do not need millions of IOPS and traditionally have had to sacrifice capacity, using many 15K RPM SAS drives, to get the performance they need. As the Total cereal video points out, choosing the right product can provide what you need in just one serving!
We had our partner OCZ in studio for a recent webcast discussing what SSDs provide compared to hard disk drives. Listen to the recording for more information what SMBs need to know about SSDs. Staying with the food theme, adding a small number of SSDs to a Drobo B1200i spices up the performance the same way as adding a few dashes of hot sauce to a dish. A few dashes are all you need and all applications using the storage benefit from acceleration.
As we discussed in the webcast, SSDs are very different from hard drives. They are light and power efficient, like a Drobo. They do not, however, replace hard drives in all applications; OCZ agrees that large-capacity HDDs will continue to serve great use cases for the foreseeable future. What WILL suffer in popularity though are 15K SAS HDDs, which are becoming lower in capacity than some SSDs and no lower in cost. In preparing for the webcast, I found that Wikipedia had better technical background than vendor sites, as usual 
Net = You don’t have to buy several shelves of storage to get the performance you need for your applications in a small environment. Choose “just one bowl” with Drobo. Sure, it can be difficult to switch from the routine you have followed for years, but consuming storage more efficiently saves money and time. And with extra time, a little goes a long way.
Talk live to Mario and other Drobo experts @ http://www.drobo.com/live or e-mail mario@drobo.com.
Mario Blandini
Mario is VP of Technology Solutions @ Drobo. Responsible for technical marketing, the pre-sales technical team, product marketing contribution, and solution development with industry partners, he is the voice of Drobo webcasts / podcasts and the pitch man in most Drobo videos. Talk live to Mario and other Drobo experts @ http://www.drobo.com/live, or e-mail mario@drobo.com.
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